LOOBY
Now that every one of our sporting heroes
is, until proven innocent, just another illicitly
juiced-up pin-cushion, the term ‘pointy end
of the season’ has a whole new meaning.
Hypodermic or not, the point is it’s finals time.
and for many of our great gladiatorial codes
this means that, for a few weeks at least, the
whiff of excitement might actually overpower
the whiff of scandal.
In the nick of time, too. Because we’ve all
become a little too dependent on drugs in sport.
Not just the players and the coaching staff and
the sports scientists and the journalists. all
of us. we’ve overdosed. Nobody is innocent.
we should all be ashamed, and quite possibly
investigated. But let’s move on. Let’s get out
there and learn something else from sport, for
a change. Something that doesn’t come with an
appendix of pharmaceutical trade-names.
I was taught a valuable lesson from sport,
involving nothing more than a perfectly legal,
albeit powerful, substance. I was in the change
rooms, gearing up for a junior footy match,
when I went for a pre-game bladder empty, as
you do. except my hands were still slathered
with Deep heat. I couldn’t stand still for the
entire game. the coach singled me out in his
half-time address for being constantly on the
move, even when I was nowhere near the ball.
In other fields, soccer has taught me every
trick in the book – should I ever need to feign a
broken leg...and a miraculous recovery.
then we have cricket. Now there’s a game of
‘learnings’. Many of them entirely legitimate.
If not for the teachings of the leather and
willow, I’d have no inkling of the profound
cultural, religious and historical distinctions at
play in every clash between cricketing giants
like India and Pakistan. I’d also have no idea
that swinging your arms around in the middle
of an oval for a few years can lead to the kind of
male-pattern baldness that requires expensive
and highly publicised hair transplants.
thanks to table tennis, I know that if you
flick your fingers down the near side of a hollow
plastic ball it will speed away from you and
then, as if having a sudden change of heart, skid
into reverse and scuttle straight back. Needless
to say, this is the kind of knowledge worth
knowing. If only to demonstrate to your kids
that there is still some fun to be had in sport
that doesn’t involve mysterious concoctions
from Mexico.
Netball has shown me that, sometimes,
it’s perfectly acceptable for grown-ups to run
around with bibs on, if that’s the kind of thing
they’re into.
the game of pool has taught me that heavy
coloured spheres, when juggled drunkenly by an
idiot, have a nasty yet entirely natural tendency
to bounce off each other at rakish angles,
resulting in self-inflicted concussion that, while
amusing your ‘friends’ no end, is probably not
in the best interests of your health in the long
run. Funnily enough, the same goes for anabolic
steroids.
and I have to hand it to badminton for
proving that even I can grow weary of jokes
about cocks, shuttling or otherwise.
tennis has shown me that some professional
sports attract more than their fair share of
over-bearing egotists. and that’s just the
players’ parents.
Golf has taught me that, no matter how hard
I try, I can’t give a toss about golf.
Darts, on the other hand, has been a rich
source of insight. the most memorable being
the time my big cousin got bored of the board
and took aim at my little cousin’s head. I had
to extract the incriminating evidence from
the back of the poor kid’s scone before the
grown-ups heard the screams and started
asking awkward questions. What did we stick
him with? Why did we do it? of course we
said we didn’t know anything about it, and they
let us off with a warning and a lunch break.
Point taken.
GOOD CLEAN FUN
» Mic Looby (@MicLooby) is a cyclist, editor,
writer, pet custodian and adviser-in-waiting to
the new Federal Minister for Sport.
“Tennis has
shown me
that some
professional
sports attract
more than
their fair
share of
over-bearing
egotists. And
that’s just
the players’
parents.”
12 THe big issue 13 – 26 sep 2013